


The Hint of the Century

by Blake



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Communication, Established Relationship, Fertility kink, Fluff, Happy Ending, Humor, Jealousy, Light Angst, M/M, Modern Era, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 19:15:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30009669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: Merlin is jealous. He's also wrong about a lot of things.
Relationships: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 124





	The Hint of the Century

**Author's Note:**

> For the record, I wrote most of this before naming our baby goat Mordred.

The worst part is that they don’t even spring apart from their cuddle on the couch when Merlin sneaks in through the front door and slams it behind him. 

“Hi, Merlin,” Mordred says without lifting his head from Merlin’s boyfriend’s shoulder.

Merlin twists his face into a dark mockery of the boy’s false sincerity and aims it at the back of that stupid head of thick black curls that Arthur probably likes to run his fingers through.

“What did you bring me?” Arthur asks without turning away from the television, his voice technically just as fond and playful as always. In the days _before_ Mordred, Merlin would smile at the affectation of entitlement, or maybe even feel his cheeks heat up at the thought of playing housewife to his overworked husband who can’t cook anything more complicated than frozen pizza (even though the roleplay was no more than just that, since Merlin is no chef and works just as much overtime).

But that was before: before they took in this eighteen-year-old charity case who was somehow sort of distantly related to Arthur’s half-sister and who needed a place to stay for a couple of weeks; before those couple of weeks turned into three months; before Arthur started to not _care_ that the boy was a freeloader because Mordred was very blatantly seducing Arthur to his favor.

Now, Merlin is darkened by the experience of having seen Mordred carefully watching Arthur type in his PIN when paying for groceries. Now, Merlin is soured by having told Arthur of his suspicions and being told in return that he was being “ridiculous.” Now, Merlin is gutted by the way Mordred squeezes between them on movie nights to curl into Arthur’s side, as if the boy _knows_ he can get away with whatever he wants to get away with because he’s young and pretty, his smooth complexion completely unwrinkled by the ravages of years of hard work and a rocky long-term relationship. Because he’s seductive and probably planning on stealing Merlin’s boyfriend away from him any day now, or else stealing all their credit cards, if he hasn’t already. 

Now, it’s different.

Merlin slams the curry takeaway onto the kitchen table with a loud sound that’s impossible to miss, even over the sound of the anime that’s playing. Arthur _hates_ anime, but he’s smiling. “Nothing,” Merlin sighs, just to make it clear that he’s being contrary. “ _I_ don’t do _anything_ for you.”

Arthur turns to look over his shoulder then with a soft, hurt pout, as though he’s only just realized that Merlin isn’t coming over to give him a kiss and ask about his day at the office. His light eyes and golden hair gleam the same artificial blue in the television light, and Merlin is overcome by a savage, terrible urge to kiss him and ask him to say that they’ll always be together.

But Merlin’s stomach wrenches painfully at the thought. He wishes he could look at Arthur’s lips and think _anything_ but the litany of questions: _Has he kissed you yet? Has he tried? Have you thought about kissing him? How far will you go? Do you even realize the way you look at him? Will you kiss him back? For how long? Will he steal our money, or will you just give it to him? Will you come back to tell me I was right all along? Or will I lose you?_

Instead of getting up to comfort his boyfriend of six years, though, Arthur turns back to the anime (which he hates) and shifts closer to Mordred, as if protecting _him_ from Merlin’s perfectly justified outrage.

And in that perfectly justified outrage, with tears forming in the corners of his eyes, Merlin takes his curry, grabs a fork, and locks himself in their bedroom.

It takes fifteen whole minutes for Arthur to come find him, plenty of time for Merlin to vividly imagine a dozen different ways their life together could fall apart.

“What’s wrong, Merlin?” Arthur asks as soon as he’s closed the door behind him. Merlin’s not sure what gave him away: the pile of crumpled tissue behind him, the Lana Del Rey loop playing on his phone, or the fact that he’s curled up on the far edge of the bed, facing the wall.

“Nothing,” Merlin answers, stifling a sniffle. He’s so tired—too tired to deal with making an attempt to communicate his worries to Arthur only to be told that he’s being uncharitable.

Arthur turns the music off—presumptuous bastard—and climbs into the bed, close enough to dip the mattress but not close enough to touch. “You’re doing the thing again, the one where you stuff your problems and don't talk to me.”

Merlin scoffs. He is _not_ doing _the thing_. _Arthur’s_ the one doing the thing, the one where he pretends to be ready to listen, but he’s really just ready to invalidate everything Merlin says and make it all about himself. Which is why Merlin does _the thing_ and ends up storing up all his problems until they’re explosively huge and come across as really alarming and difficult for Arthur to process with anything but disbelief. It’s not the healthiest cycle to be caught in. It had started early on in their relationship, after Merlin’s estranged father had died: Merlin had kept the news to himself for weeks out of respect for the fact that Arthur had been dealing with a big row with his own father. And when Arthur _did_ find out, instead of comforting Merlin, he had thrown a fit about Merlin not loving him enough to _want_ his care and not trusting him to be mature enough to hold two complex thoughts in his brain at once. How is Merlin just supposed to magically _open up_ about his problems when he can see Arthur’s reactions coming a mile off, but Arthur can’t read _him_ well enough to initiate the conversation? Stuffing it until he can deal with it on his own seems like the best option.

Maybe Arthur has a point. Maybe he _is_ doing the thing. “I’m just tired,” he says, tears welling in his eyes again, wishing Arthur would just hold him and whisper, _I know the kid is a horrible nuisance, and I’ll kick him out tomorrow because his presence is upsetting you so._

Instead, Arthur turns on his side, grazes his fingers with such _painful_ tentativeness along Merlin’s hip, and says, “Did you see how thoroughly Mordred cleaned all the pan lids?”

Merlin grinds his teeth, lets his eyes flutter madly beneath their lids. He spent years of his life guiding Arthur by the hand through the coming out process, holding his hair back as he drank his way through combatting internalized homophobia, sitting through _dozens_ of excruciating family dinners with Arthur’s bigoted father before it got bad enough that Arthur finally cut ties with him. And now this idiot child gets to reap the benefits and have Arthur openly admiring him for cleaning some stupid pan lids that they never even use because they’re too busy working to cook? It makes his stomach turn with something as eviscerating as betrayal. “Why on earth would I have looked at the pan lids when I brought you takeaway?” he says, aware his grumbles are barely escaping the tight clamp of his throat.

Arthur turns on his side, the heat of his body following the curve of Merlin’s but without touching. He sighs. Merlin can taste the curry on his breath. “Why does he bother you so much?”

Okay, so maybe Merlin’s not quite as opaque as he thinks he is, and maybe Arthur has gotten a bit better at reading him, but instead of feeling relieved, Merlin feels cornered. “I don’t know, why do you _like_ him so much?” he snaps, turning over so their knees knock violently together. It doesn’t feel like any gain in ground when Arthur’s the one whose eyes widen, hopeful and fond in the glow of the fairy lights above them.

“He’s a lot like you, you know,” Arthur whispers, tracing fingertips across the back of Merlin’s hand.

“Yeah,” Merlin spits, thinking of all the times Arthur and Mordred have bonded over football, goat cheese, ab workouts, homophobic dads, lager, superhero movies, or any of the other things Merlin cannot understand. He thinks of Arthur beaming at Merlin across the room all those times with an expression that said, _See? This guy gets it_. “Like me if I was a better match for you, you mean.”

Arthur quite visibly struggles to swallow down his first reaction, whatever it was. He licks his chapped lips, and Merlin wants to taste them instead of facing the fact that he might have underestimated Arthur’s ability to set his own feelings aside in order to have a conversation. “That’s not what I mean. At _all_. He doesn’t remind me of you in _that_ way. He—he just…” Arthur opens his eyes to look at Merlin, as if waiting for him to fill in the blank, but Merlin is too busy trying to set aside his urge to smother all vulnerability with some quality snogging in order to actually have this conversation.

“He what?”

Arthur sighs. His breath still tastes like curry. “He makes me think what it would be like if you and I had a teenager of our own.”

Merlin blinks. And blinks again. It’s not exactly like the world is crumbling around him, but it is a bit like a garish building he constructed with unskilled hands on an unstable foundation is collapsing to dust around him—a cloud of debris to choke on, a newly blank slate, and the kind of loss that feels like relief. “You think of him as our child?”

There’s pink on Arthur’s cheeks. He’s embarrassed—embarrassed for thinking about _raising children with Merlin_. Not for anything even remotely having to do with infidelity.

Merlin’s heart is pounding and won’t shut up, but he somehow manages to hear Arthur through the ruckus: “Well, it’s not like I want to _adopt_ him. But, it’s—I don’t know, I guess I just like the feeling of taking care of someone who needs us, of trying to be a good influence. And the way he looks up to both of us and tries to share things with us—I don’t know, it’s just. Kind of nice.”

“Kind of nice,” Merlin echoes, processing all this news, which is, quite frankly, a lot of news. Over the past few months, it has never once occurred to him that Mordred is making a show of cleaning pan lids not to take his place but to impress him.

“Mind you, I’d never raise a child so rude as to overstay their welcome for so long,” Arthur adds with a bit more conviction, as if trying to sell Merlin on his ability to parent.

“You want to have my babies,” Merlin says, a delayed reaction with a smile that makes up for the lost time.

Arthur’s brow furrows and his mouth parts in affront, but he’s still blushing. “That is not the conversation I’m trying to have right now.”

“Well, it’s the conversation we’re having right now because you’re clearly just here for my sperm,” Merlin tells him, making a fist in the soft, stretchy cotton of Arthur’s t-shirt and trying to pull the solid bulk of his body closer.

Arthur props his head up on one arm to cast an incredulous look down at Merlin. “I’m just trying to figure out what’s making you so miserably sad all the time.” He touches all over Merlin’s face, a reflexive smile taking over his own when his fingers brush the bite of Merlin’s grin—answer enough, it seems. “And besides, you’d be the one to carry the baby.”

“Nah.” Merlin tips Arthur all too easily onto his back and props himself up over Arthur’s broad chest. “Don’t have the hips for it.” 

“Neither have I,” Arthur protests while Merlin settles between his legs and grinds his half-hard cock against Arthur’s through their matching pajama bottoms, giving into some extremely gay mockery of a primal mating urge. Merlin takes Arthur’s curry-chapped lips with his own and fucks his tongue between them until Arthur lets out a moan. It’s such a beautiful, simple sound, but it shakes Merlin to the core until all the rubble is shed and all he can feel is the heartbeat beneath his own, and he laughs. He laughs with the loose, physiological joy of a person who’s just escaped a death sentence.

“I’m sorry,” Merlin says against Arthur’s sternum, where he has settled his head to wait out his untimely laughter.

Arthur’s arms wrap around him, hands sliding under his shirt and into his hair. “I take it you’re not sad anymore.”

Merlin nestles closer until his face is tucked safely between Arthur’s jaw and clavicle, nothing but clean, stubbled skin and a hot pulse beneath his lips. It’s enough to subdue his laughter into a smile. “Promise me I’ll never lose you to someone else?”

Arthur hums, the vibration of it in his throat like a kiss against Merlin’s mouth. Merlin is glad to be hidden here, where he doesn’t have to see every thought flicker across Arthur’s face, doesn’t yet have to face the shame of Arthur realizing Merlin has wasted so much time being _jealous_. Merlin relaxes into the serenity of absolutely knowing, without being told, that whatever Arthur’s considering, it’s not whether they’ll be together forever.

“I promise,” he finally whispers, so shaky and solemn that Merlin moves to straddle his hips and swallow all traces of the words down into the safety of his own throat.

“Good,” Merlin says through a mouthful of Arthur’s lips, coming rapidly to life under the static cling between their bodies. 

He doesn’t quite realize he’s aggressively grinding back and forth along Arthur’s cock until Arthur’s hands grab hold of his hip bones to steady him. “I take it you’re not tired anymore, either,” Arthur observes with no shortage of amusement.

Merlin shakes his head. “I haven’t had your cock in me for ages,” he says by way of explanation. It suddenly feels like a very urgent matter, despite the fact that it’s probably only been a handful of weeks, and he’s had Arthur’s mouth, arse, and hands by his side every step of the way.

“Mm, how negligent of me.” Arthur’s eyes flash dark as he helps himself under Merlin’s clothes to stroke eager fingers across his hole.

Merlin rubs back against the pressure in little circles, heart in his throat over Arthur’s hungry gaze and how gorgeous every single line of his face is when he’s simultaneously blissed out and concentrating like this. “Fuck me,” he demands, though all it gets him is Arthur’s strong arms squeezing around him and a mouth full of tongue.

It’s not what he asked for, but it is blindingly, spine-tinglingly good. When they pull back for breath, Arthur grinds their foreheads together, his panting breaths tasting of nothing but sex, and says, “I’ll fuck you so good.”

It’s incentive enough for Merlin to sit up to strip off his shirt and reach for supplies from atop the bedside table, where they conveniently never really bother to put them away. He presses the bottle of lube in Arthur’s hand and then starts the awkward process of pulling the rest of his clothes off without giving up his perch on Arthur’s stomach. For good measure, he pulls Arthur’s trousers down to his thighs and lets his fingers graze up the length of his erection. Apparently, between the clumsy striptease and the manhandling, Arthur has been rendered unable to do anything but stare and open the cap of the lube. “You’re so fucking beautiful,” is all he has to say for himself when Merlin takes the bottle and squeezes some lube onto his own fingers.

“Let’s hope the baby gets my genes, then,” Merlin deflects; Arthur is so gorgeous, he can’t even look at him while he starts fingering himself open or his heart will burst into pieces, but Arthur doesn’t need to know that. 

Grabbing the back of Merlin’s head, Arthur pulls him into another kiss, which Merlin can’t even complain about, then presses two of his perfect fingers inside where Merlin has gotten himself wet, and Merlin will definitely not complain about that, either.

“Fuck, you’re so tight,” Arthur gasps once his fingers are twisting and stretching Merlin out, too shallow to give anything but the vague, burning _promise_ of pleasure to come.

“And whose fault is that?” Merlin asks, kissing Arthur’s lips until they’re soaked and shining, lost in the way that Arthur’s knuckles rock in and out against his rim but not too lost to squeeze his hand between their stomachs to jerk Arthur’s cock until it’s full and hot enough to fill him up _just right_.

With a mangled sound that vibrates in their kiss, Arthur pushes a condom into Merlin’s free hand and slides a third finger in.

Half-joke and half-experiment, Merlin pulls back to look into Arthur’s eyes, purse his lips thoughtfully, and whisper suggestively, “What if we skip the condom tonight?”

The condom gets knocked out of Merlin’s hand when Arthur tackles him onto his back and kisses him within an inch of his life, so. That particular half-experiment’s results appear to be in. “Fuck, Arthur,” Merlin whines, unreasonably turned on by how Arthur’s kissing his way down his neck and chest while his fingers are driving hard and deep inside, feeling him out.

Arthur’s mouth looks terribly beautiful as it bites and licks hungrily at Merlin’s small, flat nipple, but it’s even better when he comes back up to suck a mark onto Merlin’s neck. “You’d let me?” Arthur asks, a secret against his neck, as if they’ve used protection for anything other than convenient cleanup in the past several years.

“Yes, _fuck_.” Merlin wraps his legs around Arthur’s middle and drags him in, cursing himself for only just now tapping into his partner’s apparent kink for procreative missionary sex. The man who giggled his way through getting tied to the headboard and grimaced every time Merlin tried calling him _daddy_ goes wild for making biologically impossible babies. Who knew. “Fill me up.”

Merlin loses some time, then, to the mindless bliss of Arthur’s bare, hot cock parting him open and taking up space inside until every little pulse catches his breath. When he manages to open his eyes and the ringing in his ears dies down enough for him to take in any of his surroundings beyond the short, gentle thrusts making his blood rush madly through his veins, he can barely even make out the words Arthur is moaning around a mouthful of Merlin’s neck skin.

“Come on,” Merlin says, grabbing Arthur’s favorite overstuffed pillow and attempting to shove it underneath his hips. After enough jostling, Arthur takes the hint and arranges their limbs better to make the most of the easier angle, fucking in hard and deep enough to make Merlin’s eyes roll back in his head.

Merlin’s a bit more caught up in the sounds of their skin slapping together and the creaking of their metal bed frame, but he manages to hear enough of the filth Arthur is mumbling to spit it back out at him a few glorious minutes later, when he can tell Arthur’s getting close. “Gonna fill me up with your come?” he hisses against the sweaty hairs stuck to Arthur’s temple, hands clutching at the soaked skin of his strong back under his shirt. Saying it makes his own cock dribble between their stomachs, so he slides one hand between them to fully commit to this thing and bring himself off to the thought of getting pumped full of his boyfriend’s sperm. “Gonna give it all to me, breed me so good, Arthur, gonna—”

“Yes,” Arthur chokes out, panting as his thrusts approach bruising force, splitting Merlin’s legs open wider, and fuck, it’s insanely good. “Fuck, yes, Merlin, gonna—got so much, do you want it, fuck—”

“ _Yes_ ,” is all Merlin says before he feels Arthur coming inside him, spurting hot and wet all over, making him sloppy-fucked and _so full_ , and the pain-pinched pleasure on his beautiful, sweaty face sends Merlin so fucking close to the edge that it only takes a few more brutal, desperate twists of his hand before he’s coming all over himself and seeing stars.

It’s Arthur’s mouth on his skin that wakes him up from what can only be described as having passed out. Dazed, he watches Arthur’s tongue clean up every splatter on his chest and stomach, and when he catches Merlin’s eyes, he seems to take it as consent to slide two fingers back inside him and just _feel around_ , never mind how oversensitive and uncomfortably sticky it makes Merlin feel.

The intrusion is _definitely_ uncomfortable when his entire body clenches in surprise at the sound of a shouting voice on the other side of the wall. “ _Is it safe for me to shut off the telly and go to bed now?_ ”

Arthur’s eyes go from shock-widened to laughter-crinkled in a matter of seconds, and Merlin belatedly registers the sound of the television volume turned to maximum and realizes their flat is too small for dirty talk with a guest in the next room. He lets his head hang back and yells as loud as he can, “Good night, Mordred.”

Arthur lunges up to rest his head on Merlin’s pillow, withdrawing his fingers, which Merlin immediately misses. “He told me he’s interviewing for a job next week.”

“A real, paying job?” Merlin whispers with facetious skepticism, aware of the echoing silence as the noise from the front room disappears.

“Yes, so he can afford to move into a flat with his friends.”

Merlin sighs contentedly, pulling Arthur in by the collar of his shirt for a filthy kiss. Soon, they’ll have their flat to themselves again, the whole of their lives stretching out before them to fill with whatever they want. He pulls back and smiles in that way that makes Arthur’s eyes drop instantly to his mouth, without fail. “Once he’s gone, we should—”

Arthur bites his own lip, thumbs across Merlin’s cheekbone. “Yes?” he asks, very clearly expecting a laundry list of all the loud, messy sex they should have when the flat is theirs again.

Merlin kisses the soft furrow of his brow until salt stings his smile. “Adopt a cat.”

The brilliant sparkle in Arthur’s eyes is impossible to resist, and so Merlin melts completely and vows for the thousandth time that his purpose in life is to give Arthur Pendragon whatever his heart desires. “It’s a plan,” Arthur says, every syllable a promise that they’ll always be together.


End file.
